The following is a guest post by David Murton. David has been helping companies build and maintain their online relationships with customers since 2006. He is also a professional writer and blogger, with a particular interest in the open source Drupal platform.

When it comes to online marketing, there's almost too much information and advice to comprehend. If it's not the importance of social media, it's how 2011 is the year of online video. But one thing many experts tend to forget in amongst rapid technological change are the basics. What follows below is an A to Z list of tips that are sure to improve your site navigation, your website optimization, and as a result, your conversion rate.

A is for Anchor Text

Your anchor text should utilize keywords. For example, if you are a hosting reseller, phrases like "resell hosting" should be turned into links, just like we did here. Using keywords for anchor text is a classic and effective SEO trick.

B is for Buttons Instead of Text

Your call to action should be more than a boring text link buried inside marketing copy. Use a bold, bright button instead when you say "Get 15% Off Today!"

C is for Colors that Don't Kill the Eyes

Colors are very important when it comes to site navigation. Colors that are too jarring, too bright, or too contrasting will encourage visitors to navigate away as quickly as possible before an emergency trip to the optometrist becomes necessary. Use bright colors sparingly and effectively, such as in call-to-action buttons.

D is for Descriptive Text

"Click here" makes for horrible anchor text. A keyword phrase that describes where the click will take the user is much more effective, both from the point of view of user experience as well as SEO.

E is for Experimentation is Good

Experiment with your website navigation. See what happens to your web statistics when you introduce a new button or change your layout. You might also find out that one small tweak to your navigation vastly improves conversion rates.

F is for Flash is Bad for the Main Navigation

We think that using Flash for the main navigation structure is a bad idea. Instead, stick to simple, easy to read navigation bars that rely mainly upon text links.

G is for Ghost Directories

Avoid ghost directories. For example, if your website includes MyWebsite.com/pictures/madonna, then MyWebsite.com/pictures should also exist.

H is for Homepage

Your homepage is the most important page on your site. It should be easy to skim, with compelling information above the fold that encourages browsers to stay on your site.

I is for Interlinking

When you interlink, visitors will find more and more content, keeping him on the website longer. The longer he's on the website, the more likely he is to eventually make a purchase.

J is for "Just Don't Make Me Think"

As letters N, O, and P point out, website users don't want to have to think too hard on your website. Don't force them to wonder where content is, or they will get frustrated and leave quickly.

K is for Killing Conversions with Slow Load Times

If it takes your website longer than a few seconds to load, you've already lost your customer.

L is for Links that are Visible

We think it's a good idea that you stay old-school with your link colors and decorations, using classic blue, underlined links and purple visited links. If old-school blue and purple are good enough for Google, it should be good enough for you.

M is for Mobile-Friendly Design

More and more website users are going mobile, accessing your site from their mobile devices. Make sure your website is mobile friendly – reduce the amount of content, minimize text entry, and test, test, test.

N is for Navigation Should be Simple and Easy

You'll get more sales with a rudimentary website design that's laid out simply and is easy to navigate than with a fancy website design where it's impossible for the user to find what he's looking for.

O is for Organization

As with N: your website should be well-organized. If your navigation is overly complicated, visitors will leave without giving you a chance.

P is for "Pay Now"

"Money" pages should be linked to from nearly every page on the site. The potential customer should never have to wonder where they click to make a purchase.

Q is for Quick Glance

Put your website to the "quick glance" test: can you get the gist of a page with one quick glance?

R is for Readability

It's amazing that in 2011, people are still designing websites that are difficult for the average person to read or skim. Use dark text on a white or light background, and break up text with bold headers, bullets, and numbered lists that appeal to short attention spans.

S is for Search Box

Especially if you have a large site with a lot of pages, don't frustrate your visitors. On every page, include a search box that's prominently displayed as part of the site navigation.

T is for Track the Results

As you work to improve your site navigation (see letter E), track results and make a determination if changes are improving sales or decreasing them. Learning to use traffic analysis tools properly is crucially important when it comes to improving your website and your conversion rates.

U is for Unusual is Usually a Bad Idea

Some web designers try hard to make their websites stand out from the crowd by using clever, artsy designs. For the standard blog, business, or retail site, an unusual design will lose money rather than make it.

V is for Video Length

When using online videos, make sure that they are short and to the point. Hardly anyone will stick around to watch an extremely long video about your products; three minutes or less should be enough.

W is for "Where Am I?"

Some websites wisely include at the top of each page a brief outline for the visitor of where he is on the site. For example: "Home > Products > Shoes." Each part of the "Where Am I?" description is linked so that the user can easily go up or down a level in the site.

X is for X-Ray the Website Skeleton

Your main navigation is like your website's skeleton – the basic structure around which your website is built. The main "bones" of your website should be as crystal clear as a femur on an x-ray for visitors.

Y is for You Should Pay Attention to Your Own Experience

As you think about how you want to improve site navigation on your own site, pay attention to your own browsing habits on other websites. Watching how you react to site navigation will teach you a lot about what works and doesn't work on your own site.

Z is for Zealous Improvement

Go back to letters E and T again and again, and take the Japanese "kaizen" approach to your website. That is to say, you should continuously improve your website based upon what you learn from experimentation and tracking the results.

Last week I wrote a fairly controversial post about John Mayer whoring his Twitter account by selling ad space in his Tweets. The piece split the Twitter community with strong opinions on both sides of the fence. Many agreed with my position of maintaining a community free of paid product placements. Others were less sensitive and saw paid Tweets as a commercial reality for the service moving forwards. Having made my opinion abundantly clear on how I believe Twitter shouldn’t be used to market, it’s only fair that I provide some input on the type of positive contributions I believe marketers can make within Twitter. So without further adieu, here’s my guide on how marketers can avoid becoming dirty Twitter whores…

It’s all about the (unpaid) referrals!

First things first, I should clarify that I do believe referrals present the greatest marketing opportunity for businesses on Twitter. Why? Because Twitter is a conversational medium. Twitter is little more than word of mouth brought into an electronic environment. The only real difference is that the conversations are no longer private. Everyday on Twitter, thousands of people ask for and receive reviews of specific products and services. Just like they do in real life. It’s one of the most common uses of the service.

However… paid referrals simply aren’t the answer. They hold no credibility. Marketers have never been able to manufacture word of mouth with cash. Just ask John Laws. The cash for comments debacle remains one of the Australian media industry’s most infamous scandals. Consumers trust each other. They don’t trust corporations and they don’t trust John Mayer on his choice of soup.

The best way to organically influence genuine word of mouth has always been to deliver great customer experiences. Plain and simple. The same principle applies to the online environment and Twitter. If you create great experiences people will talk about them. They will recommend your company. And that’s where the real marketing opportunity lies. In generating referrals. Referrals are the currency of the Internet. After all, isn’t Google little more than an automated referral system? Twitter provides an alternative to Google’s algorithm by using people power to generate the referrals. And unlike Google, people are far easier to influence. All you need to do is take the time to connect with them.

Smart marketers have realised that Twitter is actually about people. They’ve realised it’s about creating great experiences now so that when the time comes, customers volunteer positive referrals on your behalf. It’s about paying it forward. Comcast are probably the most famous example with their proactive customer outreach program. And Telstra are following in their footsteps by pioneering the customer support approach in Australia.

These businesses are successful because they embrace the strength of the medium – personal contact and real conversations. Unfortunately, Dell are giving people reason to think the same old marketing tactics can succeed within Twitter.

The broadcast approach

Dell aren’t bad when it comes to corporate social media implementation. They lead the field in many ways. But when it comes to Twitter, they’ve reverted back to broadcast. Dell uses Twitter in much the same way as email. They blast out offers and discounts en mass. The problem is it seems to be working to some extent, with claims they’ve made over $1 million via Twitter. This apparent success makes it easy for marketers to stick with what they know best – broadcast.

The problem is that Dell is the exception rather than the rule. You don’t have as many customers as Dell. And your product probably isn’t as good either. A direct response strategy is only going to work for companies with a highly engaged database that really want their products. If that’s not you, forget about a Dell style Twitter broadcast approach… because people simply won’t care. Many have tried, but few have truly succeeded. Jetstar and Virgin Blue are two Australian brands with large customer databases and a sought after product (discount travel). If neither of them has been able to effectively leverage Twitter (albeit with pretty lame attempts) do you think you’ll do much better…?

Going back to the future

So what does this mean for businesses? Rather than trying apply broadcast techniques, marketers need to recognise the nature of the medium and adapt their strategies accordingly. A lot of people asked me why I was so offended by John Mayer’s “paid Tweets”. It’s not that ads offend me. I am a marketer after all. It’s that the marketers are ignoring the nature of the channel. It’s lazy marketing. Just like the principles of effective print advertising don’t translate to television, the core principles of broadcast marketing don’t translate into Twitter.

Marketers that want to succeed in Twitter need to go back to the future and embrace one-to-one customer communication. It’s what Twitter is all about. Only real interaction will generate great customer experiences. And only great experiences will foster genuine referrals. It’s time to start talking to your customers again…

If you read my blog regularly enough, you’ll know I enjoy using social media. I owe a hell of a lot to it. In fact, I’d probably still be waiting for my first visitor if it weren’t for StumbleUpon & Sphinn. However… lately I have been pondering its applicability as a legitimate corporate marketing tactic. Sure, social media works beautifully in driving traffic to tech and marketing blogs, but can it really stand up as a genuine tactic in the marketing mix…?

It seems I’m not the only one considering the issue. Dave Harry wrote an excellent post a few days ago questioning the value of social media as a professional (and chargeable) service. He’s gathering feedback from some of the web’s most influential social marketing gurus to help understand measurement metrics used and the ROI of social media. Undoubtedly, their input will carry far more weight than mine, but I thought I’d chime in to the discussion nonetheless. After all, social media is the only medium I’ve utilised to drive my blog. So I think I can contribute a nice little case study.

So… let’s get down and dirty. While I’m not a web analytics guru, here’s what I consider important in measuring the value of the social media traffic I have generated:

• Engagement – How long are visitors spending on my web site? Are they going on to read other pages?
• Loyalty – Do the visitors return to my site after initially finding me via social media?
• Inbound links – Was the content considered valuable enough to draw links from other bloggers?
• Conversion – Do visitors subscribe to my blog? Not a perfect or typical measure of conversion as Dave points out (blogs aren’t structured with subscription as a primary action). But we have little else in terms of a transaction. So it will have to do.

Let’s have a look at the stats:

Engagement

Length of visit:

Page Views:

Hmmm…. it seems the social media folk are a fickle bunch. Wham, bam and thank you maam… online versions of the two minute man. Actually, most would be happy with two minutes. Three quarters of visitors don’t stay longer than a minute. Perhaps they need some of that nasal spray stuff…

But wait… I hear you ask. The page views are encouraging. Over 57% of visitors are going on to view a second or third page. Wrong! This is a strange StumbleUpon phenomenon I’ve never really been able to explain. It seems StumbleUpon users are particularly fond of the refresh button. A closer look at the navigational paths on a good traffic day reveals this trend. In the shot below I’ve analysed the traffic for one of the more popular posts ‘The importance of blogging frequency’.

Ho-hum… 39.91% of the 41.28% to ‘visit another page’ seem to have hit the refresh button. They actually haven’t gone anywhere. D’oh! I think it’s safe to say at this point that engagement isn’t a forte of my social media traffic.

This is hardly groundbreaking research. It’s fairly common knowledge that most social media consumers are drive-by readers. And I can hardly blame them. After all… that’s exactly the way I consume most social media aside from a handful of my favourite blogs. Pot meet kettle…

Loyalty

Number of times each unique visitor has viewed the blog:

Not good news here either I’m afraid. Almost 93% of visitors have failed to return. And three quarters of those stayed less than a minute. It’s a little sobering when you think of it like that…

Inbound Links

Ummm… do we have to discuss this…? Fine… it’s zero. Let’s never mention it again.

Conversion

At this point in time my humble little blog has 10 subscribers. Don’t snicker please… it is new after all ? You can laugh if this count is similar in July. My conversion rate looks something like this:

Unique visitors – 592
RSS Subscribers – 10
Conversion rate = 10 / 592 = 1.7%

Hmmm… are we on to something here…? A 1.7% conversion rate ain’t that bad right… particularly in the absence of a clear call-to-action. After all, most ecommerce sites convert at around 2-3%. Surely a little site optimisation could get me up to the standard conversion rate… That may well be true, but it all comes down to ROI.

I haven’t been tracking my hours, but I suspect I’ve invested well over 50 this year on the following tasks:

1. Setting up the WordPress platform
2. Organising a domain name and hosting
3. Writing and researching new articles
4. Reading other blogs and commenting on them
5. Contributing in Sphinn & StumbleUpon
6. Struggling through the various associated technical problems (and I mean really struggling!)

Now, I’m not a digital marketing consultant. So I don’t have an established hourly rate. But let’s just say for arguments sake that I charge $50 an hour (pretty damn cheap for an online marketer).

$50 x 50 hours = $2500
$2500 / 10 subscribers = $250 per acquisition

Ouch! I don’t know too many marketer’s who’d be happy with a cost per acquisition of $250. And if they did… they’d be out of business. Naturally, this equation will improve with the technical infrastructure now in place. I’d also like to think that participation in social media over time will bring economies of scale, whereby I work less for more traffic. But I’m a long way from that point…

So where does this leave social media?

By now it probably seems as if I’ve given up on social media. Nothing could be further from the truth. The reason is that I know it works in my niche. Social media delivers results (both traffic and authority) in the digital marketing industry if you are persistent enough to establish a real presence.

But…

That’s my personal decision. I’m not measuring ROI. All I’m investing is my own time… as valuable as it is. And I’m not in it for monetary gain.

Corporations are a different story. Social media participation is just a one more tactic in the overall marketing mix (albeit a tactic generating a lot of buzz). I tend to think my experiences are completely typical of anyone starting out with blogs and social media. How many marketeers will persist with it after those first 50 hours. Not many I would think… Why would they when they can set up a PPC or affiliate campaign that generates a similar conversion rate (if not better) and takes just a few hours to set up?

There’s also the question of how much traction social media can generate in industries with lower participation levels. We must remember that as digital marketers we are unique. Most people don’t Stumble and they don’t Digg… and they never will. How many people are going to vote for blue chip content addressing the latest developments in steel and iron ore? Not many… which is a shame because blue chip organisations are probably amongst the rare few with the budget to invest in social media.

In the end it will all comes down to reach. Can social media ever reach a saturation point when content voting and submission becomes a standard part of online behaviour for your average Joe? It’s only at this point that social media benefits will be transferable to a broad range of industries and truly become a genuine marketing tactic for the corporate world. I’m sceptical…

A final word

Aaron Wall wrote an interesting and provocative article on SEO Book this week comparing SEO with PPC. He chided most companies for focusing on short term tactics such as PPC at the expense of SEO, which delivers a true long term competitive advantage.

The same may be true for social media. Some corporations will undoubtedly make it work. Video in particular holds real potential. Those with the vision, dedication and customer focus have the potential to reap the long term benefits of traffic and authority. However, I suspect most will dabble, and write it off as a failure within months of inception…

For now I hold little hope for social media in the corporate marketing mix. But who knows what the future holds? After all, few would have predicted the rise and rise of corporate blogs at the turn of the millennium. Never say never…

In my most recent article I posed the question of whether it was a sin to Sphinn your own blog article. It turns out it’s not. The overwhelming response via this blog and Sphinn was positive. It also turned out to be a pretty popular topic. It went hot within Sphinn and has been on the front page for over 24 hours. Go me!

Naturally… I was pretty excited with the outcome. It’s just the sixth article I’d published, and only the second I’d distributed via Sphinn. I was eagerly awaiting the spike of traffic to my new blog. After all, both Alexa and Compete rank Sphinn within the top 6,000 sites on the web in terms of traffic. And Compete estimates Sphinn receives over 325,000 unique US visitors a month (let alone the rest of the world).

So it was with some disappointment that I reviewed my stats to find that I received just 45 visitors in the 24 hours after the article hit the front page. I suspect the fact that it hit the front page on a weekend didn’t help my cause. But unfortunately, that’s when I have the most time to write my articles. This was just 15% of the traffic I had attracted to an earlier article courtesy of a handful of StumbleUpon votes.

But after the initial disappointment died down I got to thinking… which set of visitors was more valuable to me. What was ultimately more important – quantity or quality…? It’s a point that Seth Godin touched on in a recent post regarding mass marketing. Here’s what Seth had to say…

‘Many bloggers seem to be on a perpetual hunt for the front page of Digg. Sure, it brings you hordes of eyeballs, but then they turn around and leave… Doesn’t it make more sense to incrementally earn the attention of a smaller, less glitzy but far more valuable group of people who actually engage with you?’

Touche. I’m not saying that StumbleUpon is poor quality traffic. Indeed, the people who Stumbled my site had indicated an interest in online marketing. But the fact is that Sphinn is a mecca for opinion leaders in the field of online marketing. There was a far higher likelihood that my article reached the eyeballs of those who really matter in the industry. Indeed, I was happy to see feedback from industry experts including Jill Whalen & SlightlyShadySEO on Sphinn.

Now… unfortunately, my own procrastination has cost me the opportunity to run a meaningful analysis of the Stumble visitors against the Sphinn visitors. I haven’t yet got around to installing Google analytics on this blog. D’oh! Ideally I’d assess the bounce rate, pages visited & time on the site for both sets of visitors. But that’s simply not possible. Here’s what I do know though:

1. So far 37 people have cared enough to vote for the article on Sphinn.
2. 19 left comments about the article on Sphinn.
3. 5 have left comments on my blog.

Let’s consider the engagement rates of the two groups of visitors:

StumbleUpon -300 people visited my site. One person left a comment. The engagement rate is 0.03%.

Sphinn - 45 people visited my site. Five people left a comment. The engagement rate is 11.1%.

I think we’re on to something here. Now the true test will be to see whether the Sphinn audience is indeed engaged enough to return to my blog to read my new articles. I certainly won’t be submitting this article to Sphinn. If it is submitted by a fellow Sphinner I will consider the whole adventure a great success… (in the words of Borat).

The experiment continues…